Politics

Paul Ryan gave a speech yesterday on “the state of American politics”. It wasn’t very good, and Daniel Larison ably criticizes it here.

The rise of Donald Trump has led to predictions that the neoconservative dominance of Republican foreign policy is about to end, whether or not Trump wins. The Donald has challenged the perpetual military interventionism aspect of neocon-think without doing any damage to his campaign and, in the process, he has certainly noticed who the most strident voices being raised against him are.

Micah Zenko marks the fifth anniversary of the Libyan intervention by poking holes in the official justification for the war:

In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles.

A Israeli security firm with a shady past handled the security operations at Brussels airport, the scene of the terrorist attack on Tuesday.  Security firm ICTS have a trouble history, managing services that ‘coincidentally’ happen to be the scene of some of the biggest terrorist incidents of recent times. ICTS security missed several of the 9/11 hijackers who flew out of Boston’s Logan airport on September 11th 2001. The same Israeli security team also handled security for London’s bus network during the 7/7 London bombings.

Belgian and Western authorities knew the details about the ISIS attack in Brussels on Tuesday, but failed to do anything about it.  The Belgian security services knew precise details about the attack plan, which was formulated at the de-factor ISIS capital of Raqqa, in Syria. Haaretz.com reports: The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.